


Take the Fire out from the Water

by redtypewriter



Series: White Black Gray [3]
Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Mass Effect 2, Morality, Paragon Shepard (Mass Effect), Pre-Relationship, paragon shep just trying to find where she belongs in a gritty reboot, significantly less angsty than the other two, talking about feelings oooh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29865540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redtypewriter/pseuds/redtypewriter
Summary: People carry the dead with them, try to do them proud. The dead don't usually come back to see how you've been doing, though.
Relationships: Female Shepard/Garrus Vakarian, Shepard/Garrus Vakarian
Series: White Black Gray [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2194470
Kudos: 9





	Take the Fire out from the Water

**Author's Note:**

> title from...a different wolf parade song. oops. Ok so all 3 of these fics (you don't have to read the first two if you don't want) are along the same vein and the same emotional thread and it's about to be resolved baybee. Paragon Shepard and bad boy Vakarian own my ass.

Garrus hadn’t actually been to her cabin before. It was certainly bigger than any he had seen on a military ship before, but this was a Cerberus vessel, no matter how much it looked like the original Normandy. He hadn’t meant to follow her, he just...hadn’t gotten off the elevator, and she gave him a look that said ‘are you coming?’ when she got off.

She walked in and sat down at her desk, staring quietly at her picture of the SR-1 crew together after defeating Saren. They had their arms around each other, obviously being forced to take this picture somewhere between getting medical attention and taking a shower, but the exhaustion and filth seen on each of them was one that was born from accomplishment. Shepard just wished they had taken one together when Kaidan was still there.

“Are you okay?” Garrus asked her quietly, both sitting in her cabin, on their way to the lair of the Shadow Broker, where he had come to check on her. Ever since they met back up with Liara she had been quiet. Shepard just shrugged.

“What’s wrong?” He tried again.

Shepard chewed on her lip and looked at the fish tank. 

“Sometimes it just strikes me how much time I missed.” She admitted.

“Is this about Liara?” He guessed the obvious.

Shepard nodded. “There’s this...thing. That I’ve noticed. Every time somebody I knew died, I carried them with me, tried to live in a way that made them proud, to try and think about what they would do.” 

Garrus nodded, thinking briefly of his old team, and how he would always try to remember what they would’ve wanted.

“That’s one of the weirdest things about coming back from the dead, I guess. People did that with me, and...it’s…” she paused, trying to figure out how to say what she wanted to say and still keep the conversation only about Liara, not sure if she was ready to open the can of worms labeled ‘Archangel’ just yet. “Strange to see how people interpreted who I was after the fact.”

“Maybe I’m being really selfish. I know that what you all did with your lives after I was gone had nothing to do with me but,” she buried her face in her hands for a moment, thinking of what to say next, and then sitting back up on her own, putting her face in her hands.

“Being forgotten about is one thing but...I mean...Liara had a piece of my armor in her apartment, she  _ obviously  _ hadn’t forgotten about me. So did she look at that armor and feel guilty when he came home from a long day of spying on people? Or did she think, for some reason, that she would be making me proud?”

Garrus could feel a second meaning poking its head out from behind her words, and knew that Liara wasn’t the only person that he meant. Garrus had thought about it at the time, of course. How could he not? His commanding officer that showed him again and again that doing the right thing didn’t always mean not getting things done. She had been the only person to ever make him feel unbound by red tape and see that it wasn’t there to bind him, but to make the people he was protected feel safer. But things changed after she died. The paths became bindings again and he had to escape before he was pulled apart. Garrus frowned, and looked down, remembering how often he had thought of her, how he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she would be disappointed.

Garrus opened and closed his mouth a few times, starting to say something before deciding against it, then starting to say it again.

“Is it just Liara that we’re talking about?” He asked cautiously, knowing the answer.

She answered with a sigh. “No.” She said quietly. “Did you think about me?” She asked, afraid to hear the answer.

“All the damn time,” Garrus said.

Shepard didn’t know if this is what she wanted to hear from him. How she could’ve still lived in his mind and he still ran off to Omega.

“And...when you did...what did you think about?”

Garrus squeezed his eyes shut, remembering how painful that little voice that sounded like her in the back of his head had become, how resentful he had become of it, and how horrified he was that he had started to hate the memory of her voice.

“I always knew you would be disappointed in me, Shepard.” He said, his voice low and quiet- like maybe she wouldn’t hear.

She wanted to say that she wasn’t disappointed, and she wasn’t, not really. But to say it would imply that she wasn’t at least hurt and confused by it. She might not have been if it hadn’t been for their conversation after meeting Dr. Saleon, where he told her she had been right, and that he still wanted to be a Spectre, but wanted to do it by the book as she did. She remembered how weirdly proud she had been at how let down he seemed when she stole the Normandy, how he could’ve just kept agreeing with her but that seemed like she had really changed his mind.

“Then why did you leave your Spectre training?”

Garrus paused, unsure how to say it, the disapproving visions he used to get of her in his dreams coming to the surface. 

“You’re….death,” he paused, still not liking the word in relation to her. “It hit us all really hard. Tali was distraught, Joker was in shock and felt so damn guilty, Ashley sort of shut down- all that fire she had it was like it just...went out. Wrex just...left one day, and Liara- was the only one that seemed….well…” He thought about what Liara had told them, that she had recovered Shepard’s body and given it to Cerberus, and chills went up his spine. He was grateful that she had- how could he not be? But the look of...violation that Shepard had when Liara told her wasn’t something he was likely to forget any time soon. “She seemed better off than anybody else. I guess now we know why but at the time it felt like she just wasn’t that affected by it. It made me angry. Everything did. It was like I was back right before I met you, just all twisted up and furious at anything that stood in my way, even if it was for good reason. 

“It sounds so twisted to think about it now and I don’t think I ever really believed it but thought if you had followed the rules less, maybe you’d have kicked up a fuss when they sent you on such a small, arbitrary mission and you’d have been somewhere else or...if you had just saved yourself instead of Joker.” he said, his voice filled with more guilt than she had ever heard. He couldn’t believe he had said that last part out loud. He had had the thought more than once but every time he pushed it down with all of the shame he had felt at thinking it.

“I didn’t want to do my job wrong, though. You were still in there enough for me to know that was off the table- but Omega...Omega didn’t even have security to be corrupt. Maybe I made a loophole for myself to fit through but I needed to do some good and I just couldn’t be anywhere near the council that tried to undo your whole legacy.

“I got into a really self-destructive mindset. Went to Omega, convinced myself that I could at least get something done, no barriers, no red tape, no Counciler’s denying that you ever mattered. Maybe I just wanted to shoot some people without being forced to feel bad about it. Maybe I just wanted to prove something to a ghost.” He remembered how he would see her in his dreams, telling him he was a failure. 

“I’m not sorry for it all, though.” He said, more confidently now. “We did a lot of good on Omega, took out a lot of really dangerous people and I still don’t think that there’s any other way to do justice in a place like that. But that doesn’t mean that I went there for the right reasons.”

“By the time all that anger started to fade, it had just become my life, leaving didn’t really occur to me. It didn’t hurt as much to think about you anymore. I still knew I wasn’t where you wanted me to end up but I got back into the mindset that you had been right, everywhere in the galaxy you’d be doing exactly what needed to be done, unless you ended up in Omega. Then it just became about the mission and my team. I was helping and it felt good. It had started to wear on me a bit, though, even before I lost my team, I knew that it couldn’t last forever. I wish every day I had cut and run earlier- because then they might still be alive, but what’s in the past is in the past.”

Shepard was staring at him, her legs curled up and her head resting on her knees, her eyes big and staring at him. Garrus realized what he had said, and had to tear his eyes away from her, unsure he could handle whatever her response was.

“I’m sorry. I know that’s a lot, and I don’t feel that way about you anymore, I swear, and-” he was cut off by a soft hand on his forearm, that gently pulled him towards her into a hug, which he returned gratefully, and buried his face into her neck. He had never been so close to her before and thought he could feel her warmth through his armor. No matter what had happened, it had led him back to her in the end, which he had never expected to get another chance to be again. When she let go he felt every spot she had touched grow cold in her absence. 

“I’m not disappointed in you, Garrus. When I first found out I was...confused. Maybe a little hurt that you didn’t follow through with what you told me you would do but I wasn’t disappointed. Especially not now.”

Garrus felt like his joints had turned to jelly. Since he had quit his job and revoked his Spectre application, since flying to Omega and becoming Archangel, the thing he had known for sure was that Shepard would have been disappointed. It was what kept him at a distance once back on the ship, why he kept trying to prove himself to her over and over, and it turned out that he didn’t even have to.

He had to sit down, be backed up until the back of his legs hit her bed and he sat down. Ignoring the fact that he was  _ on her bed.  _

“What’s wrong?” She asked, clearly worried at his shocked face.

“I just,” he paused and took a deep breath. “I  _ never  _ expected you to say that, Shepard. Even after all this I still thought that you…” He couldn’t finish his sentence. 

“Maybe there was a time when I would’ve been more upset,” she remembered how she was when they first met, rule-bound to a fault, so sure of herself and her every action. Back then she wouldn’t’ve spared a moment on a vigilante, but now things had changed. “But things are different now. We’ve both changed so much. When we first met I don’t think I would’ve understood but...I’m not exactly with the alliance anymore either.” She had thought a lot about her younger self, so idealistic and belligerent. 

Garrus laughed a little. “Guess we’re both vigilantes now, huh?”

“Oh my god, I’m a vigilante.” She said, sounding stunned, and Garrus laughed.

“How’s it feel?”

“Weird.” She said, still looking a little bit surprised with herself.

“Maybe you need a name. You could be my sidekick.”

She rolled her eyes and threw a stress ball on her desk at him, which he caught.

“You’re  _ my  _ sidekick, Vakarian.”

“Hm...I don’t think that’s right, Shepard. I’m a better shot, I think I’m the superhero.”

“Oh is that what you think?”

“Oh yeah. Wanna prove me wrong?”

She laughed louder than he had heard since coming back, and he was a little stunned by just how much he liked the sound of it.

“EDI- who’s got the highest kill count right now? Me or Garrus?”

“Those numbers would not be an accurate measurement of who has more skill, Shepard. The level of difficulty per target is a factor that would not be counted.”

“EDI.” she said in a warning tone.

“You have fourteen more kills than Officer Vakarian.”

Shepard jumped up and shouted ‘yes!’ and Garrus couldn’t bring himself to argue if that was how happy it made her.

“Alright, alright. I’d be interested in hearing those other factors if I’m honest but...I suppose I can let you have this one.”

“Uh-huh, don’t be a sore loser.”

He felt lighter. He could be the sidekick if she wanted him to, after that conversation, he felt like he’d do just about anything for her. He used to imagine the two of them as Spectres together, ending up on the same ship but on more equal footing, but two vigilantes fighting collectors was good too. 

“Shepard, we are approaching the Shadow Broker’s base.”

Shepard’s laughter died down, and she stood up and stretched.

“Thanks, EDI.”

She looked at Garrus. “Thank you, too, Garrus. I mean it, that’s been...bothering me for a while so I’m glad we cleared the air.”

“Yeah, me too.” He said, and rested a hand on her shoulder. He wondered when they had gotten so...touchy-feely.

She walked out of the cabin, and he followed behind, just like he always would.


End file.
